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Designer steroid might be flashback to '60s recipe
The new designer steroid THG at the heart of a global doping scandal was likely based on a US firm's discontinued research dating back nearly 40 years, the researcher who detected the drug said on Wednesday. Don Catlin, head of UCLA's Olympic Analytical Laboratory, identified THG last summer from a tiny amount of liquid in a syringe provided by a track-and-field coach. Since then, at least five track-and-field athletes have been banned for taking THG, and more are facing possible bans, including 100-metre record holder Tim Montgomery. Triple Olympic champion Marion Jones is also under investigation. The two top officials at the San Francisco-area BALCO labs and two others, including baseball star Barry Bonds' trainer, face steroid distribution charges. What appeared to be a cutting-edge rogue effort to develop a novel steroid that would evade detection in testing may be based on a drug norbolethone developed by pharmaceutical firm Wyeth but never marketed. "I think somebody was reading old literature and ran into norbolethone and saw how powerful and potent it was in animal models and decided to synthesize some," Catlin said in a telephone conference call. "They had access to the materials and it was no trouble to make it." Norbolethone was apparently first developed in 1966 as researchers were attempting to see if norbolethone could treat people who were underweight or unusually short. Two spokesmen for the firm said they had never heard of the drug. "Wyeth never took it to the market, it stopped its production and it lay fallow there all of these years," said Catlin. "There is clearly a relationship between norbolethone and THG because when you make THG, if you let the reaction run too long you get some norbolethone." Mysterious origins The development of THG remains one of the mysteries of the BALCO scandal. BALCO owner Victor Conte is a college dropout and former rock musician who spent many hours in the library educating himself about nutrition. Any steroid alchemist could look up "hundreds if not thousands" of forgotten steroids, Catlin said. "When the drug companies were really active 20-30 years ago in steroid chemistry they were making prodigious amounts," he said. "They would take a molecule and change one little atom and then make another little change; they were making hundreds of them and describing them in great long papers." Catlin spoke during a more than two-hour call in which officials at the US Anti-Doping Agency described how they first received a tiny sample of THG last summer and then slowly peeled away the lawyers of the scandal. For several months investigators worked under a cloak of secrecy. Early in the scandal, Catlin says he was sworn to silence while consulting with local law enforcement officials investigating BALCO and doing the tests on the THG for USADA. Only later did it emerge that the two probes were linked. US investigators eventually synthesized their own THG last summer and wanted to produce a urine sample so they could detect whether athletes had taken the steroid. "We knew we couldn't give this substance to a human," said Larry Bowers, USADA's senior managing director. Instead, they gave a single dose to a baboon at the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas and then sent several days of urine samples to Catlin for further research. The baboon did not show any signs of increased strength. "As far as we know from the reports we got in the primate centre there were no effects on the animal that they could detect," Bowers said. "Steroids normally don't work by a single dose and all of a sudden muscles start bulging out of your shirt." |
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